"Ideogram" is a Myth

Interesting chapter on the "myth" of ideographic writing: http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/ideographic_myth.html
I follow the arguments pretty well, and on some level it's all about splitting a very fine hair: the notion that Chinese writing exists (or ever did) completely independent of sound as a way to transfer ideas. The point being that the language, as soon as it shifted from representational drawings into actual writing, began to use one symbol to stand for things that were pronounced the same, even if they were dramatically different in idea or concept. The example given is the word for "wheat" - in Chinese, the character that means "wheat" also means "come," because they were pronounced the same way. The symbol was first a stylized picture of a wheat stalk, but as soon as it was standardized into writing, it was used to mean something that had nothing to do with wheat, but which sounded the same when spoken. Egyptian heiroglyphics were similar.

OK. I get it. I also get that the notion of an ideogram-basis for the symbols is reinforced by the fact that you learn really simple symbols first when learning Japanese or Chinese - stuff like "river" and "mountain" and "man" that look sorta like those things. This makes it easy to keep thinking of the characters as ideograms rather than "letters" the way the Roman alphabet works.

Fine.

What it doesn't change is that one symbol, perhaps complex but still a single entity, functions not only as a sound (or in Japanese, potentially several sounds) but also as an idea or an entire word. And in Japanese, the limited number of phonemes (sounds) means that one phoneme is associated with several characters, and the meaning is impossible to distinguish unless one knows the kanji or the context. I think it's not that "ideogram" is a bad label, but instead that it's been taken to mean "picture-only language component."